Nigel farage

I have celebrated John Bercow, eulogised Martin McGuinness and urged Spectator readers to vote Labour. So I appreciate I’m on thin ice with a defence of Jo Brand, and since the hefty lefty and I are of similar girth, that metaphor could end badly. Yet the news she is being investigated by police over a joke ought to bring even the most phlegmatic conservative to the barricades. Some things are just wrong, even if Brendan O’Neill is against them too.  Appearing as a guest on Radio 4 panel programme Heresy on Tuesday, Brand riffed on the phenomenon of ‘milkshaking’, in which progressives throw chilled beverages over people they disagree with because when

What a bunch of big babies the right can sometimes be. These people spend oodles of time mocking lefty snowflakes and touchy students for taking offence at every off-colour joke or un-PC point of view. And yet it turns out they’re just as susceptible as any moaning millennial to having a fit of the Victorian vapours when someone says something they find offensive. Exhibit A: the unhinged fury over Jo Brand’s joke about battery acid. Seriously, over the past 24 hours right-wingers have given the PC left a run for its money on the boo-hoo offence-taking front. You thought it was only purple-haired SJWs who try to get comedians sacked

Leavers only, please Sir: Your leading article (‘The end of May’, 25 May) correctly calls for the Conservative party to establish itself as ‘unequivocally the party of Brexit’. The meltdown at the EU elections confirmed this is now the only course of action open to it, if it wishes to survive. Conservative MPs should show they have finally woken up to reality. They need to send the membership two candidates with impeccable Leave credentials, and who are not in the current cabinet. Placing any Remain-tainted candidates on the shortlist would display MPs’ continuing contempt for the party’s activists, supporters and donors. It would also show a curious lack of interest

Nigel Farage has been on the radio this morning, almost plaintively offering to be part of a Government team renegotiating the Brexit Withdrawal Agreement. Maybe it’s a genuine offer in good faith. Maybe it’s a political wheeze, meant to make him and his Brexit Party sound like a proper, grownup organisation. And maybe it’s revealing something about Farage and what he really wants. I don’t claim to know Farage well, or even at all. I’ve interviewed him several times and spoken to him many times less formally. I’ve also spoken to many people who have worked with him over the years. And one abiding impression I’ve taken from all that

It is now fashionable to describe Nigel Farage as an ‘extremist’, ‘far right’ or ‘fascist’ politician. Last month, Dame Margaret Beckett denounced his ‘brand of extreme right-wing politics’; this week, Armando Iannucci tweeted: ‘Any vote for Farage on Thursday won’t be seen by him as a protest but as support for his brand of far-right UK politics.’ And on Monday, the author and journalist Ben Goldacre described the Brexit Party leader as a ‘far right ideologue who wants to abolish the NHS.’ So what prompts otherwise intelligent people like Iannucci and Goldacre to describe Farage as ‘far right’? And is that description really fair? A quick glance at Farage’s politics

Nigel Farage became the latest politician to be pelted by milkshake today, as he toured the centre of Newcastle ahead of the European elections on 23 May. The Brexit Party leader was talking to members of the public in the northeastern city when his assailant, carrying a Five Guys milkshake, surged forward and threw the beverage over him. Afterwards, Farage was overheard criticising the ‘complete failure’ of his security team for not protecting him from the attack, which they should have ‘spotted a mile off’. He later commented on Twitter that: https://twitter.com/Nigel_Farage/status/1130453547819180033 Watch the moment Farage was hit here: https://twitter.com/TheKennyScott/status/1130461115228540929  

The echo chamber is the defining characteristic of this berserk and entertaining political age: squadrons of foam-flecked absolutists ranting to people who agree with them about everything and thus come to believe that their ludicrous view of the world is shared by everybody. It is true, for example, of the Stalinist liberal Remainers — that tranche of about one third of the remain vote who will tell you proudly that they have never met anyone who voted leave and that therefore either nobody did vote leave — or they voted leave but we shouldn’t take any notice of them because they are worthless. The BBC, civil service and academia share

When people challenge my opinions I shrug, said Vladimir Nabokov. When people challenge my facts, I reach for my dictionary. Brendan O’Neill, formerly of the Revolutionary Communist Party and Living Marxism, now of Spiked, has had me reaching for mine. He accuses me of lying, a charge which might send a less liberal journalist than me to his lawyers. He says my charge that his comrades and the Brexit Party’s European Parliament candidates Claire Fox, James Heartfield and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert are cavalier about the abuse of children “are lies, straight-up, low-down lies,” “character assassination”, and an act of desperation by the remain side. The desperation is all his. For

Nigel Farage’s Brexit Party pretends to stand for the traditional values of old England: Parliamentary sovereignty, patriotism and decency. However little the uninitiated thought of Farage, they would expect his candidates to condemn the IRA murdering children in Warrington and to take a strong line against child pornography. Not so. Or rather, not always. Claire Fox (top of the list of Brexit Party candidates for the North West), James Heartfield (one of the party’s candidates in Yorkshire and the Humber) and Alka Sehgal Cuthbert (a candidate in London) are all former members of the Revolutionary Communist Party and its successor organisations. The RCP’s defence of the IRA when it was blowing up children and Living Marxism’s (the RCP’s

The weekend papers are filled with grim poll predictions for the Conservative party – and good news for Nigel Farage’s Brexit party. An Opinium poll suggests that the Brexit party will win a larger share of the vote in the European elections than the Tory party and Labour combined. With regards to a general election, the Telegraph has published a poll which says the Brexit Party has also overtaken the Conservatives in Westminster voting intention for the first time – and predicts that the party would win 49 seats in a general election now.  Building on that momentum, Farage appeared on the Andrew Marr sofa this morning to lay out

Something’s been missing from Westminster these past few days. Normally, in an election week, there is a buzz about the place. Politicians feast off their encounters with the voters, coming back from the campaign trail with new theories about what the public really want. But this time, few MPs from any party seem keen to talk about this week’s local elections — or the impact they are likely to have on Brexit, Theresa May’s tenure in No. 10 and the future of British politics in general. This is because they know that the European elections, which are just three weeks away, will have a huge influence on all of these

Even with all the volatility in British politics right now, it is still remarkable that the Brexit party are favourites to win the European Elections just a week after launching. But will the Brexit party winning actually change anything, I ask in The Sun this morning. I think there are a several ways it which it will have an impact. First, it’ll make MPs more cautious about a second referendum. One of the reasons why support for the idea has grown in parliament is a belief that Remain would triumph. A Brexit party victory would challenge that assumption. Next, I suspect that Farage’s new party topping the poll would make

On Friday, in an inconspicuous metal finishing factory on an industrial estate in Coventry, Nigel Farage officially launched his new Brexit Party, and set out its strategy ahead of the European Parliament elections on 23 May. The message of the day was clear: the people, especially Leave voters, have been let down by the Westminster establishment, and voting for the Brexit party is the best way to show that you are angry, and willing to do something about it. Kitted out in his customary Union Flag socks, Farage hit out at the way the Brexit negotiations had been conducted so far, describing it as a ‘wilful betrayal of the greatest